Wednesday, April 18, 2007

You probably shouldn’t – you’ll eventually see I/O problems (hang’s and general slowness) on the file servers. I see this occasionally with new clients that we bring on, and not surprisingly it’s the IT organizations (or HR) that often institutesthe policy of having users store their .PST files on the file server. It’s hard to argue with the logic – PST files stored on a file server can get backed-up. Further, on smaller networks you can often get by with doing this for quite a while – until growth and higher I/O utilization cause the issue to manifest itself.

So you can either store the PST files locally and risk them being lost or destroyed - or, put them on files servers and risk having the I/O problems. If you’re looking for a compromise, check out the Outlook Add-In Personal Folders Backup tool. There are also some other third-party tools like Genie Outlook Backup, and Mobiliti Outlook Backup. The downside of course is that these are all compromise solutions in that they don’t’ just work. In each case, it’s another layer of complexity – deployment, management, and user training to consider.

2 comments:

I agree. I have a law firm, who has kept their archive folders and 'old email' PST's on the server for backup reasons. However, lately, some of the attorneys have been complaining of Outlook crashing and/or being slow. I accredit it to PST's in the size of 2GB or more... Recently I have moved some of them locally and have XCopy scripts backing them up nightly.